UK employment burdens
Posted on 31 Oct 2024
After the hefty extra employment law burdens placed on employers, yesterday's Budget hammered businesses with heavy additional National Insurance bills.
These, coupled with the significant additional workloads placed on management by remote working, makes me wonder what the future holds for UK employment.
Over the past 18 months, we have outsourced 20% of our workforce to India and the benefits to the business are enormous. The people there are better educated, more committed and technically more adept than their UK counterparts. Undoubtedly we will outsource more and export more UK jobs overseas.
Not only that, but outsourcing is 50% cheaper than a UK employee and no holiday pay, sick pay, maternity pay, paternity pay, pensions or employers NIC.
If I'm going to have to have the extra workload of managing people remotely, it makes no diference to me if they are in Milton Keynes or Mumbai. Except that they are considerably cheaper and better in Mumbai!
And we are not alone. More and more of our clients are outsourcing parts of their operation to overseas providers in eastern Europe and India.
The Chancellor is pinning all her hopes on growing the economy to pay for her lavish spending plans. How achievable is that I wonder if more and more service businesses like us adopt an outsourced model?
